The Oxford Movement
BY THE BISHOP OF PLYMOUTH (THE RT. REV. J. H. B. MASTERMAN).
IN "Y the centenary of the beginning of the Oxford Movement will be gratefully commemorated by many churchpeople who are unable to identify themselves with the later developments of Anglo-Catholic theology and practice. This is as it should be, for all the honey. of the Tractarians did not pass into the Anglo-Catholic hive ; mtich of it went to nourish the whole of English' religious life.
The strength—and weakness—of the Oxford Movement lay in its appeal to the innate conservatism of English character. A too indiscriminate distrust of the spirit of the age, amounting almost to panic, belonged to the Movement from its beginning. The enemy, Liberal thought, seemed to be coming in like a flood, and the Oxford leaders called on the Church to lift up a standard against him. They did not see that the enemy might prove to be a friend in disguise. Keble, the real " beget- ter " of the Movement, was in no sense an innovator ; his whole outlook lay along the lines of traditional Anglican theology, going back through the Non-Jurors to the "Arminian" Church leaders of the seventeenth century, and so to Hooker and Jewel and to the early Christian Fathers. The mediaevalism which ultimately proved a disruptive influence came in with Harrell Fronde and— at a later stage—with Ward. 'Newman's early love for the writings of Sir Walter Scott may have predisposed him in the same direction, but his antipathy to the Roman. Church only gradually gave place to an almost reluctant admiration as he came to regard the position of the Anglican Church as akin to that of the Donatists and Monophysites of the fifth century. St. Augustine's seturus judicat &Lis terrarunt was, for him, the death- knell of the Anglican claim. "By these great words of the ancient Father, interpreting and summing up the long and varied course of ecclesiastical history, the theory of the Via Media was absolutely pulverised." When Newman's defection threatened disaster, it was the firm- ness of Keble and Pusey in holding to the appeal to the early Christian Fathers that rallied the shattered forces of the Movement ; but the lure of mediaevalism remained a weakness and a danger.
Several writers have recently laid stress on the moral and ethical foundation on which the original Movement' rested. It seemed to the Oxford leaders that the Evan- gelical revival, in its appeal to emotional experience, made no adequate provision for building up Christian character. But was not this the very purpose of the Church ? It was not enough, they felt, to gather the sheep into the fold ; they must be fed and tended by divinely appointed shepherds charged to minister the sacramental grace by which the faithful Might grew in holiness, and the discipline by which they might be guarded from "error in religion and vieiousnesa in life." They claimed that this conception of the ministerial office was plainly in accord with the Anglican Ordinal, and that it afforded the only security for a valid succession of authorized ministry. In actual fact, the main influence of the Oxford Movement has been in fostering a deeper sense of the high privilege and solemn responsibility of the priestly office. The idea of the Via Media—the special vocation of the Anglican Church as a "bridge Church "—has never really been understood by the general body of lay churchpeople, who are inclined to say, "Protestantism I know, and Romanism I know, but who are ye ? " Yet the Anglican Church stands or falls by its claim to have conserved truths to which neither. post-Tridentine Romanian nor Protestantism has been able to give adequate expression.
In contrast with some of their successors, the Oxford leaders revered the English Prayer Book, and urged that the primary duty of churchpeople was to be loyal to the scheme of life and worship that it provided. The idea that it lay within the competence of any incumbent to supplement the deficiencies of the Anglican Liturgy on his own responsibility would have seemed to Keble and Pusey to be quite intolerable.
The repudiation of the right of the State to interfere with the spiritual affairs of the Church followed inevitably from_ the recognition of the sovereign rights of Jesus Christ in His Church, exercised by His own appointed stewards. The protest of Keble's Assize Sermon, though the occasion of it was not, perhaps, very wisely chosen— for the condition of the Irish Bishoprics was a flagrant abuse—was the first note of a challenge that led, a' few years later, to the Scottish Disruption, and to the revival of the English Convocations. The Gothic revival in Church architecture, and the growth of decency and reverence in public worship, were partly due to the Oxford Movement, but almost as much to the general improvement in taste and artistic feeling in which the Romantic Revival and the Pre-Raphaelite movement played their part. No small part of the ' Tractarian stream was lost in the sand of ceremonial controversies that had little to do with the 'essential things with which the early leaders of the Movement were concerned. To them religion was a tremendous reality, and life a Stern and solemn responsibility. To walk humbly. with God was a harder and a better thing than aesthetic inclulgen- cies. So they were less anxious for a wide extension of the Church's frontiers than for the deepening among nominal churchpeople of the consciousness of the ingericy of the issues that confronted' the itnmortal fltitleof 'men.
Arnold's idea of a Church co-extensive with thc nation seemed to them almost the final apostasy.
It is obviously impossible to deal with all the develop- ments of the Oxford Movement. The restoration of Religious Orders, in the face of much opposition, has enriched the spiritual resources of the Anglican Church. Though the early leaders distrusted the new critical views of the Bible, their doctrine of the Church enabled many of their followers at a later time to accept these views without doing violence to their convictions. Keble's treatise On Eucharist Adoration—his most considerable contribution to the theology of the Movement—differed from later Anglo-Catholic teaching less in its substance than in its proportional emphasis.
Two final comments may be made. The Oxford Move- ment gave now vitality and definiteness to a conception of the Church that had always been represented in Angli- can theology. But definiteness may be as dangerous as vagueness if it involves a refusal to recognize the distinc- tion between what is expedient and what is essential. Still, it has been a real gain that the Oxford Movement
should have asked the question, What is the Catholio Church ? By pulverizing the idea of an Invisible Church —a contradiction in terms, as Dr. Rashdall calls it—it awakened a desire for the reunion of the Churches, which is being held back mainly by our inability to answer this question. Perhaps, in the end, we may come to recognize that the Catholic Church is among the things that are "yet to be "—not a lost good to be recovered, but an age-long dream to be realized in ways that are as yet unrevealed. The Oxford Movement asked an even more urgent question, when it presented holiness as the final purpose of all church ordinances and discipline. Faith is always a moral adventure, and only the pure in heart shall see God. But the lives of Charles Simeon and Lord Shaftesbury, of Maurice and Dale and Westcott, of Chalmers and Catherine Booth and many others, are a warning against the idea that any one ecclesiastical system has a monopoly in the production of saints. The _rigidity of their outlook prevented the Tractarians from recognizing how diverse arc the channels by which the sanctifying grace of God flows into the life of men,
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